Lane County commissioners approve drug addiction treatment clinic in downtown Eugene

Lane County Commissioners voted unanimously this week to let Oregon Recovery and Treatment Centers open a methadone clinic in downtown Eugene, saying the new clinic would help provide much-needed drug addiction treatment to the area, earning praise from liberal and conservative commissioners.

“This is a net benefit to the community, to have more medicated, assisted, treatment for folks,” commissioner Laurie Trieger said. “This is one of the most important things we can do as a county to support homelessness prevention.”

Commissioner David Loveall gave similar praise. “Your facility and what you do is tremendous work in the community,” Loveall said. “I’m excited about what’s going to happen because I think the out-of-box thinking that you’re doing, and what you’re bringing, is going to help solve a lot of the problems that we have.”

Oregon Recovery and Treatment Centers offers addiction treatment at seven clinics in Oregon and Washington, including one in Springfield. People who work for ORTC told the commissioners that many of the Springfield clinic patients live in Eugene and opening another Lane County location would let them reduce a transportation barrier and reach more people.

Matt Owen, ORTC's executive director, said travel time is one of the main barriers for people entering into and remaining in treatment.

“Over 45% of our (Springfield) patients had addresses in or near downtown Eugene,” Owen said. “Patients were struggling to juggle traveling to Springfield for treatment with their work, school and other commitments that were nearer to downtown."

The clinic will be located at the previous downtown location of One Peak Medical. Under Oregon law, county commissioners had to sign off on the clinic because it will dispense methadone, a drug used to treat opioid addiction, while being within 1,000 feet of a childcare center.

Commissioners gave the clinic permission to proceed, saying it would still be more than a block away from Newberry Child Care (and a five-minute walk according to Google Maps), there is no outdoor component to Newberry, and there is little danger to being located near a methadone clinic.

“Stigma is a barrier to accessing services and I see this as an opportunity for us to remove that barrier by demonstrating that we’ve been thoughtful in our process” Trieger said.

“Treatment should also be available and not restricted in terms of its proximity to childcare: because what is that modeling and what is that showing for the parents of kids in that childcare who may need these services?” she said.

Trieger said business owners around the proposed clinic also have a been supportive. “(ORTC) hires(s) their own private folks to keep tabs on what’s going on in the area. It just adds to increased security without necessarily law enforcement presence downtown which is something we also really need.”

Before the clinic can open, ORTC will need permission from the Oregon Health Authority and the federal Drug Enforcement Agency and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. So far, OHA has been supportive, Owen said.

Lane County has granted permission for a methadone clinic once before, when it opened its own methadone clinic in 2019 in a commercial part of Jefferson Westside.

Alan Torres covers local government for the Register-Guard. He can be reached over email at atorres@registerguard.com or on twitter @alanfryetorres

This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Lane County approves methadone clinic in downtown Eugene